Kindled interest
I bought an ’international’ Kindle ebook reader and so far so good. There are a few niggling things that I guess will be ironed out either by Amazon themselves or someone coming along with a better deal.
Pluses:
- Easy to read screen. The e-ink makes it look like a piece of paper under matte plastic and it works well in bright light.
- Highlighting and notes on books and documents
- Saves said notes and highlights online (for books bought through Amazon)
- Quick access to Amazon to get books (almost too easy to spend money). Wifi means a book is only seconds away.
- Prices for recent books are about half that of a paperback and older titles can be quite cheap
- Converts pdfs and word to native Kindle format - no cost if you use their free email service. Plain text files and .mobi ebook formats are fine without conversion. PDFs are viewable in original format, though not readable in flow-on text without conversion.
- Lots of free ebooks available at various sites, though generally authors have to be dead for a while so few books from the last 80-odd years. War and Peace is easy to carry and maybe I’ll even get around to reading it.
- Free access to wikipedia
- Built-in, contextual dictionary
- Comfy for reading in bed, though of course it needs a reading light.
- Storage for about 1000 books.
Minuses:
- Doesn’t save notes and highlights online if the document or book didn’t come through Amazon. You need to find and copy the notes file to access these. As a student, having all my notes available online would be great.
- No way at the moment to share notes online. Again, as a student I can imagine how useful it would be to see other people’s highlights and notes on common readings. In fact I imagined such a system for a class project: a service for annotating readings in common and voting/commenting on others’ notes and ideas. An open API to saved highlights/notes would be a great boon to educational developers, though I guess there would be a few copyright issues for sharing highlighted text…
- Limitations on availability of books in ebook format. Many of my favourite authors are not available. And further restrictions apply if you are in Australia.
- $2 surcharge on downloading internationally via wifi. There doesn’t seem to be an alternative to this. I’d be quite happy to download normally to a networked computer or get an email attachment if it saves me the two bucks per book.
- Browsing wikipedia is painfully slow
- Refresh rates are slow when browsing Amazon. I managed to click once too much and bought a book without knowing it.
- I’m getting used to the screen flash between pages, but it is a bit jarring.
- I think there are newspapers etc that you can’t automatically receive internationally, but that is not really much of a minus for me.
I quite like that buttons are the interface. Not sure about the screen I’m reading being used as the interface, though iPod/iPhone owners seem to be OK with this, but quite like the idea for other readers (Nook) using a small colour touch screen for navigation. I guess this would mean shorter battery life, so I expect you’d want to be able to turn off this screen. Hint for Kindle: turn off wifi to extend battery life!
There are some Japanese language ebook readers, though I’m not sure about international download access to Japanese books. After years of looking up kanji and meanings the slow way, a built-in dictionary with downloaded Japanese ebooks is very tempting.